


All Under Heaven

by CloudAtlas



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon Deaf Character, China, Diving, Documentary Filmmaking, Filmmakers, Gen, Guilin - Freeform, Minor Injuries, Photography, Rock climbing, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-17
Updated: 2015-04-17
Packaged: 2018-03-19 18:47:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3620400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudAtlas/pseuds/CloudAtlas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>桂林山水甲天下 - Guilin's scenery is best among all under heaven.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Wherein Clint and Natalia are nature documentary filmmakers, filming for the BBC in Guilin, China.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Under Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> Russian from Google Translate. Chinese from Wikipedia. Thank you to **scribblemyname** for beta.

“Barton,” Clint grunts, barely awake.

“You’ve been requested.”

It’s May. Clint groans and flings his arms across his face.

“You’ll like it.”

“Pretty sure I’ll like sleep more,” Clint mumbles, fumbling to get his hearing aids in properly.

May ignores him. She’s good at that.

“It’s the BBC. Guilin.”

Clint abruptly sits up in bed, just managing to get out “Fuck! Really!?” before the head rush hits and he has to squeeze his eyes shut to prevent his brain escaping through his face.

“Yes really,” May says, and Clint can hear she’s smiling. “For six months.”

Clint breathes out a ‘fuck’ and falls back against his pillows. Guilin. Of his top ten places to shoot, Guilin is the highest ranked that he hasn’t been to. Because of course he has a list. His brain goes into overdrive, cataloguing the equipment he’ll need – cameras, lenses, cables and harnesses – only for May to interrupt almost immediately.

“There’s a catch though.”

Clint mentally drags himself away from thoughts about how much rope he’ll need.

“And what’s that?” he asks warily. May gets him good gigs for sure – even better than his last guy, and he was _good_ – but she has a habit of getting ones that come with _catches_. Clint’s not a fan, even if one of those ‘catches’ resulted in his most critically acclaimed photo to date.

“You were requested specifically for your climbing skills.”

Clint relaxes slightly. “I’m not seeing a problem here.”

“Have you forgotten the part where Guilin is a karst limestone landscape?”

“What does – ? _Fuck_.”

Caves. He fucking hates cave filming; it’s close and disorientating and he can’t fucking _see_ , which on top of not being able to hear properly _sucks_.

“Three months in the caves, three on the rocks. Are you up-to-date on your diving permits and qualifications?”

Clint sighs. He can just about put up with the caves for the rocks. But he’s _not going to act happy about it._ Clint is a professional grownup.

“Yeah. Kate isn’t though.”

“Kate doesn’t need to be. She’s going to Brazil. Jaguars for NatGeo.”

_What the fuck?_

“Who the hell am I going with then? She’s my partner.”

Clint can _hear_ May’s eye roll. “The BBC hired an _expert on cave shoots_ , just like they hired _you_ for the high wire stuff,” she says pointedly. “A Russian that works out of London. It’ll be the two of you and a local guide.”

“What’s his name?” Clint asks. He’s going to Google the shit out of them. He knows no Russians in his line of work.

“Her name actually,” May replies.  “Natalia Romanova.”

“Never heard of her,” Clint says vaguely as he attempts to write the name down with a shitty pen and the wrong hand. ‘Romanova’ is not a name he can spell this early in the morning. He hopes he can read that when he wakes up again in… Clint looks at his alarm. Fucking shit. Why is May ringing at three in the morning?

“Then I suggest,” May says tartly, “that you look her up.”

And why does she sound so awake?

“I’m going to, _in the morning_ ,” Clint says pointedly. “Why the hell are you up?”

“Because I’m in London,” May says pityingly, “where it’s eight in the morning.”

“Since when are you in London?” Clint demands.

There is an incredulous silence.

“Do you _ever_ listen to me when I talk?” May asks.

“Melinda – ”

“Don’t you ‘Melinda’ me. I _told_ you I was going to London _three days ago_ , Clint. For the BBC and that guy who wants representing and _my brother’s wedding_. I keep track of all your shit; you could at least do me the courtesy of listening to me when I talk.”

“It’s three in the morning!” Clint all but screeches. “It’s three in the morning and I’m not working and I haven’t had coffee! I’m sorry for not being _entirely on the ball_. Christ.”

Clint and May also tend to yell at each other a lot. Clint likes her, of course he does. She’s his agent but also a pretty damn good friend. It’s just… well, yelling is the basis of their friendship. Kate thinks it’s weird, and it probably is, but it works.

“Fine,” says May grudgingly, “but I’m not getting you a tacky fridge magnet now. You’ve pissed me off.”

“Aw, Lin, no. You know they’re the highlight of my life.”

Clint’s crappy fridge is covered in shitty magnets of dumb tourist attractions. Most of them come from May. Clint gets her little statues. They sit on her windowsill and her office cleaner _hates them_.

“Yeah, yeah. Go back to your beauty sleep. God knows you need it.”

 

Natalia Romanova, it turns out, is an ex-marine-biologist (or maybe still? Can you be an ex-biologist?) turned-nature-photographer specialising in all those cold, dark and wet places that Clint has no desire to go to, _ever_. She’s done work ice diving in the Arctic. Why the fuck would anyone want to go ice diving in the Arctic? She’s also published papers on habitat-driven specialisation among deep water fish and won several awards for arctic and cave photography and documentary filmmaking. She can speak a myriad of different languages – Mandarin Chinese included – and is a member of the Royal Geographical Society in London. Clint hasn’t even met her yet and he feels like an underachieving, uncultured hick.

She is also, apparently, a red-head. But it’s hard to tell anything else because the only photo Clint has found of her has her in full diving gear with a huge underwater camera obscuring most of her face.

 

In the six months before Clint flies out to Guilin, he works short jobs across the world. He films lemurs in Madagascar (depressing, because all the remaining lemurs now live in one tiny reserve. He doesn’t even have to _try_ ) and ibex in the Atlas Mountains. He gets two magnets from May; one of the Queen and one of some big white chalk guy with his dick out. He bitches to Kate about not getting to see her for ages – filming big cats can take forever and he hopes Kate gets lucky – before treating himself to a week diving the Great Blue Hole in Belize, photographing crazy fish for the hell of it. It’s nice. He works mostly with local guides, no other film crews, and doesn’t have to go down any cave systems.

Clint really hates caves.

 

When Clint lands in Guilin airport, he’s so tired and jetlagged he almost feels hungover. He’s been travelling nonstop for nearly thirty hours because apparently getting to Guilin from the States is _hard_. Clint doesn’t sleep well on planes so all he wants to do is to collapse into the last proper bed he’ll get to sleep in for six months and not wake up for at least a week. But he has to find all his kit – and if it’s in Mumbai or Shanghai or Timbuktu or _anywhere but here_ he’s going to be _so fucking pissed_ – and clear immigration and get glared at by Chinese officials over his work visa and then find this Romanova and his local guide. So he can’t; at least not for the next… oh eight hours.

He’s supposed to meet Romanova at the hotel they’re booked into for the first three nights, but he can’t see her upon arrival and has too many bags to just wait around. The hotel is mostly full of Chinese tourists and one red-haired woman with the figure of a fifties screen goddess. Clint does a quick mental tally of all the female camera operators he knows and dismisses her. Women who tote heavy camera equipment and sleep in ditches for a living tend not to look like her.

Clint finds his room, puts away his stuff and then takes his Nikon and sunglasses back down to reception to at least attempt to look awake, available and ready to work. He hopes she turns up soon. If only because it means he can finally go to bed.

“Are you Clint Barton?” comes a voice from behind him.

Clint turns to find the red-haired woman looking at him with a steady gaze.

“Um, yes?” Clint says, confused as to why she’s here and how she knows his name.

“Are you sure?” she asks.

He laughs and scrubs his hand over his face. “Yeah. Yes, I’m sure. Sorry.”

“Natalia Romanova. Pleased to meet you.”

His gaze snaps to hers before sweeping down her body. As soon as he realises what he’s done, he claps his hand over his eyes again.

“Fuck, fuck sorry. I – sorry.” He takes a deep breath. “It’s just… you look way too hot for – Oh my God. OK.”

Natalia looks slightly amused but mostly kind of pissed, like she can’t decide which emotion should win out.

“I haven’t slept in” – Clint looks at his watch and frowns when it says some morning looking time for New York rather than the late afternoon time it should for the sunlight streaming in the windows in Guilin – “oh, something like nearly forty hours. How about I go to sleep, you don’t call me for prep meetings until at least twelve hours have passed, and we pretend that I wasn’t quite so useless upon first meeting? ‘Cause I’m not normally this useless.”

Well maybe not _this_ useless, but attractive women make him pretty stupid. He has to work with her for at least three months though; she doesn’t need to know that yet.

Natalia waves him away. “Fine. Go get your beauty sleep. You look rough as fuck.”

Clint gapes at her bluntness for a second before his brain kicks back in. “I’m in 201. But I’m serious about the twelve hour thing.”

“I’m serious about you looking rough,” she says. “Go. I’m in 115. I’ll leave a message if I meet with our guide.”

 

During the three days they have in Guilin proper, Clint finds out that Natalia Romanova is freakishly organised. And that she also really, really likes cave diving. She’s already organised their local guide – a man called Shang Chi – and everything needed for her half of the trip before Clint is up, as well as sorting out a test dive in a nearby cave for the two of them to find out how efficiently they work together.

And because Clint was so horribly jetlagged, she went ahead and organised the cave filming first. Which sucks. Clint’s almost salivating at the chance of climbing those rocks, and now he has to wait three months.

 

“You can dive, right?”

Clint rolls his eyes as he pulls on his wetsuit. “Of course I can dive. They wouldn’t have hired me if I couldn’t dive.”

“You’re a high wire man.”

“Which is also why they hired me.”

Natalia looks sceptical but turns to check her tanks. Her wetsuit is surprisingly flattering. Clint looks away.

Shang is taking them upriver to some of the less touristy caves. He steers the boat like someone who’s been doing it all their life and – according to Natalia – swears like a sailor. He’s pretty cool.

Clint hasn’t finished his checks by the time they reach the cave, mostly because he spent the majority of the boat journey taking photos and checking out the rocks. He’s itching to climb, and the knowledge that he has to spend the majority of the next three months underground is almost unbearable, especially as it becomes more and more clear that Natalia doesn’t really want him here.

Clint is trained in cave diving, but it’s not like he does it all that much. And when he does, it’s in Mexico or Florida or another of those places where the water you go back to is at least a little warmer than here. He hisses as he gets in the water and Natalia shoots him a look.

“I’m sorry,” he snarks before putting his regulator in. “We can’t all be ice divers impervious to cold.”

She glares at him before signalling to Shang that they’re ready. They go through their safety checks quickly and suddenly he’s under the water.

Natalia has the main light, a big hand held thing. Clint just has a smaller torch, but he’s perfectly happy with this. As long as he stays close to her, he’ll be fine. The bubbles from Natalia’s regulator glitter in the light, and Clint watches as they escape up to the surface.

They dive down into the cavern mouth, the natural light getting weaker and weaker the further from the surface they go, before squeezing around a rocky outcrop and into the first cave of the network. It’s decent sized – he can’t see the end – but Clint can feel the closeness. Now the bubbles from Natalia’s regulator get caught, shimmering, against the rock ceiling.

They’d agreed to do some checks and exercises once in the first cave – clearing masks, swapping regulators, getting used to each other’s hand signals and the like – and when up close to her, Clint can’t help but notice the shimmering caused by the bubbles caught on her skin. Clint brings up his one and only waterproof camera and signals for five minutes of photography.

Clint has always been interested in light, and the colours and light in underwater caves is something he can’t pass up. For the first three months in these caves, he’ll mostly be acting as buddy and ‘high wire guy’ for Natalia. He won’t be bringing his own camera all that much.

 

They’ve been out of Guilin proper for a month now. They camp wherever they can – they have permits, don’t worry – and Shang comes and goes, kindly bringing them food and refilled oxygen tanks. Not that they’ve done all that much actual diving. Most of the caves are made by rivers and can be walked or swam through without the need for anything more high tech than lights and a snorkel. Natalia has got a lot of good footage and has, on those rare occasions she forgets she doesn’t want him around, taught him some interesting things about species differentiation.

However, after a month together Clint has to admit that he’s finding it a little difficult. Clint can’t talk to Shang because Shang’s English is poor while Clint’s Mandarin is somewhere between appalling and non-existent and Natalia doesn’t say anything much that isn’t job related – to him anyway. She talks quite a bit to Shang, though that could also be job related. It’s not like Clint could tell either way.

It’s not like Clint can’t work with that – he can; his job revolves mostly around silence after all. But if there’s someone around and no camera they need to be quite for, Clint likes to talk. He tried at first – making comments and observations and telling anecdotes about former jobs and Kate and mountains he’s climbed and Kate and his love for the Himalayas and Kate – but after a couple of weeks of not getting anything back, he lost steam. In the end, when he’s not directly required for shoot planning, he tries to be in camp as little as possible, opting instead for wandering around with his cameras and GPS locator (he’s not completely stupid), filming and photographing whatever he fancies.

On one of these excursions he stumbled upon a giant salamander, and he was so excited he forgot his petty avoidance routine and babbled excitedly to Natalia. She actually smiled, before realising what she was doing and quickly wiping the expression from her face.

 

“OK, I’m down!” Clint calls up. “The water is pretty deep, the current strong, and it’s uneven underfoot but the hand holds are reasonably regular. When you’re ready, send down the camera and then come down yourself. Tell Shang that from here I have one bar of signal on the satellite phone, but it cuts off pretty quick.”

They are six weeks in and exploring an unnamed cave deep in the mountains. Since the salamander, Natalia has smiled at him three times. He did dumb shit to get her to smile at the beginning, and all she did was glare at him. Now she occasionally smiles because he gets really excited about raptors. Clint is baffled.

He steadies the camera pack as it comes down, and then Natalia as she descends five minutes later. While she organises her stuff, he calls up to Shang to pull up the ropes – the only way out now is through – and finds the easiest way down the sinkhole-type thing the river suddenly disappears down. Shang had got them in contact with two geologists from Guilin University of Technology who’d explored the cave previously and who turned out to be a mine of valuable information. After the sinkhole the cave system opens out and it becomes easier to navigate, but this system is long, and the only exit is by following the river. The sinkhole is a one way trip; they can’t go back up it.

“OK, pass me that bag. I’ll go down first. You wait five minutes and then follow.”

He sees Natalia nod. He feels for the rocky handhold the geologists assured him would be there, takes a deep breath, and lets the water pull him through.

He plunges into a deep pool, eroded over millennia by continuously pounding water, and is immediately disoriented by the all-consuming dark. He fumbles for his torch and makes for the shallower water, ducking under stalactites and removing his hard hat for a moment to shake out his hair. He hears a splash as Natalia comes through the sinkhole and leaves his pack on a ledge to help her out.

He knows immediately that something isn’t quite right. Natalia is coughing enough to bring up a lung, and she’s holding her arm strangely, as if she wrenched it coming down. Her coughing is strong enough to make her unsteady and as Clint reaches out to help her to the shallower water, she convulses, losing her footing and pulling them both under.

Clint senses the exact moment Natalia’s lack of oxygen and sudden submersion causes her to panic. Her limbs suddenly lash out, and Clint is too close; the press of the water has turned her around and suddenly a booted foot comes out of nowhere and Clint’s world goes black.

 

Clint wakes up to almost complete darkness and mumbled Russian. He’s cold and wet and, for a split second, can’t remember why that should be so.

“Oh thank fuck, you’re awake.”

Natalia voice sounds rough, like she’s been screaming. Then Clint remembers her horrible choking cough.

Clint groans, loud enough to echo, and tries to sit up.

“No. No no no no. You stay right where you are.”

Natalia’s hand suddenly comes out of what seems like nowhere to push on his shoulders.

“You… I – you were unconscious _under-water_ for nearly a minute,” she gets out. “You are not going anywhere.”

“Why’s it so dark?” Clint mumbles.

There’s a pause. “You had the main torch. The river took it when you let go.”

 _Ah fuck_.

“We’ll probably find it downstream. Don’t worry.”

Clint suddenly retches and rolls over to throw up bile onto the rocks.

“Fuck,” he mumbles. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

He feels exhausted. And even worse, they have to go _through_ to get out. It’d take five minutes to get out if only they could go back through the sinkhole, but they can’t. So Clint has to haul his sorry carcass through nearly a mile of river and cave systems before he can even see sunlight.

“Hey hey,” Natalia says quickly, her hand coming out to rest on his forehead and smooth his wet hair from his face. “You’re OK. We’re going to sit a moment and get ourselves together, and then we’re going to get out of here.”

Clint doesn’t say anything to that, opting instead to try and relax as much as he can, given the circumstances. Natalia is quiet beside him, gathering their packs and fussing. She’s lucky her camera had been in her pack or else she’d have lost thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment.

“Sorry,” she says after a while.

“Why?” Clint croaks. His whole chest aches. He can’t imagine she’s doing all that much better.

“Well, I kicked you in the head.”

“You were choking. Can’t hold it against you.”

She’s quiet again for a while.

“Also for being shitty to you,” she says after a while, and Clint is honestly surprised. He thought she’d just pretend it never happened.

Clint doesn’t say anything to that though. He’s not quite ready to just forgive and forget. He spent six weeks with one person who couldn’t talk to him and one who just wouldn’t. It hadn’t been fun by any stretch of the imagination.

“My usual diving buddy was injured, so he can’t do any of this anymore. I guess I’m still not over it.”

“What happened?” Clint asks, because she’s talking and he’s going to take advantage of that. Especially as it helps him to forget that he’s almost blind in a cave under several million tonnes of rock.

“Rock fall in France. He lost an arm.”

OK, so not that great a distraction.

“Sorry,” Clint says after a while.

“Not your fault.”

The rush of the river is all Clint can hear then, distorted as he can’t wear his hearing aids around this much water. He’s grateful Natalia remembered and has stayed pretty close so he can hear. Most of the time it doesn’t matter; you can’t hear underwater anyway, and exploring caves isn’t prime conversation time.

They wait what Clint thinks is about another ten minutes. He’s getting really cold now and he has to move soon before he can’t move at all. He sits up and, when Natalia doesn’t protest, gets up the whole way and stands unsteadily for a moment before offering her his hand.

“C’mon,” he croaks. “Let’s get a-shuffling.”

They make their way slowly, Natalia going first this time, though Clint can see she’s not as confident with the ropes as he is. They take breaks often, for which Clint is grateful. He’s warming up now, but his head hurts and he can see that Natalia isn’t one hundred per cent either. The caves alternate between being so low they have to crawl – and in the first of these they find their torch, miraculously intact and working – or with water deep enough that it comes up to their chests. At one point it opens out into a cave so large even Clint in his exhausted state is impressed. He can see Natalia itching to film, photograph, _something_ , but she resists.

“Natalia,” Clint says.

She turns.

“Go film. I need to sit down anyway.”

He doesn’t, not really. At least, not any more or less than Natalia herself needs to, but she looks so happy at the prospect that he can’t bring himself to care. He just hopes Shang isn’t having kittens at the other end.

For half an hour, Clint watches Natalia move around the edges of the cave, filming the water dripping slowly from the stalactites, seeping from the walls, dropping with loud plops into the still water. At one point she gets Clint to hold their light under the surface of the water, and he watches in fascination at the whole lake seems to glow. He’s about to pull it out again when he sees her raise her finger, the universal ‘wait a moment’ signal. She takes out a camera – a small waterproof Canon DSLR rather than her larger waterproof film camera – and squats down, turning it in his direction. He looks confused as she snaps away but doesn’t say anything.

When she returns, she doesn’t say anything, just helps him pack away their stuff again before helping him up and moving on.

 

They reach the cave entrance at dusk to find Shang almost vibrating with worry. But Natalia doesn’t let him take them back to camp immediately as twilight means bats, and she is determined to catch at least some of them on film. So Shang provides dry clothes for Clint and helps him repack their stuff onto the small boat Shang is piloting, and then they wait for Natalia to be done. Shang, the wonderful person he is, has brought one of Clint’s smaller DSLRs and a spare battery pack, so Clint amuses himself by taking photographs of the surrounding rock outcrops before turning his attention to Shang and Natalia instead. The light does wonderful things to Shang’s hands and Natalia’s skin _glows_.

 

After the incident in the cave, neither Clint nor Natalia are willing to go back into the deep caves any time soon. However, they do go back with diving gear to the underground lake – walking back up the river, rather than through that damn sinkhole – so Natalia can do some proper underwater filming with Clint mostly just working the lights. Both of them have to surface more often than they normally would and Clint finds the darkness harder than usual, but Natalia gets some good shots of blind barbels and cave shrimp regardless.

Things get a little easier between them outside of filming as well. Natalia chats to him a little more and will translate for Shang now, so the three of them can sit around and have an actual conversation. Turns out Shang, as well as swearing like a sailor, also has a hilariously surreal sense of humour and can have them both in stitches with a well-timed comment. Natalia also starts properly explaining her research interests to him, and he learns a lot about fish and species differentiation and the creepy things in deep caves that Natalia so loves. Which, apart from the species differentiation, which is really interesting, he thinks is weird bordering on disgusting and she can tell. He gets his own back with ospreys and puffins other things that rip fish to shreds and she just smirks.

 

Half way through their six months in Guilin Clint and Natalia have an intense debate as to whether they should have a week back in Guilin proper, to sleep and take advantage of internet and preparation time, while letting Shang have a week off from them scaring him shitless. Clint is all in favour of a quick turnaround because he misses the sky like crazy and can’t wait to get out on the rocks, and he details this very thoroughly and at great length to Natalia. She wins though, with the very convincing argument of:

“Warm showers, Clint. _Mattresses._ ”

Clint is conflicted for all of three seconds, but the lure of a proper bed is just too much for him and he concedes.

They end up back at the same hotel as before, this time in rooms 115 and 116, and the first thing Clint does when in his room is have the longest, hottest shower he can manage before collapsing on his bed and sleeping for a solid ten hours. It’s glorious.

Clint wakes to a message from Natalia, saying there’s a message from their BBC contact and that she’s hired the helicopter they need for the two day aerial shoot. For all she talks about mattresses and sleeping, she doesn’t seem to actually need all that much. Clint finds this utterly incomprehensible – he’d hibernate in winter if he could.

So Clint talks with the helicopter people, then with May and then with Kate in Brazil via satellite phone. He backs up his data, charges all his camera batteries, swaps SD cards, double checks all his permits and does all manner of little things that need doing to ensure his half of filming goes smoothly. He then checks all his equipment, replacing ropes and fixing harnesses and making sure that he’s not going to fall to his death anytime soon.

When he’s finished he’s very ready to sleep again, but within two minutes of entering his room, there’s a knock on the door. He opens it to find Natalia on the other side, looking sheepish.

“Hey, come in,” he says, gesturing inside.

Natalia enters, giving his piles of stuff a cursory glance before turning back to him. She opens her mouth to say something, but then frowns and doesn’t follow through.

“What’s up?”

Natalia smiles, self-conscious. “This is going to sound a little weird but… normally when I come off assignment I… can’t sleep without – normally Ja- my partner, or someone…” She blows out a breath. “I have trouble sleeping alone after assignments where I’ve been sleeping around people for a while and do you mind if I spent tonight here? Last night wasn’t fun and I’d really like to sleep. I’ll take the sofa or something.”

Clint stares at her uncomprehending. They go from not liking each other to being civil to Natalia asking if she can sleep in his room.

Then something completely unrelated twigs.

“Your partner is James Barnes,” he says suddenly. James Barnes was a pretty fucking amazing American cameraman who worked out of Russia and London and also specialised in cold and wet and dark, but his shots were _amazing_ and Clint has a bit of a professional man-crush on the guy ever since his photograph of the dancing Siberian cranes was published. Just over a year ago he retired without explanation. Looks like a bunch of rocks fell on him. Sucky.

“Yes,” Natalia says, arching an eyebrow at the change in conversation.

“Dude,” Clint breathes out. “That guy is amazing. Fucking – _Christ_. He lost an arm?”

“Yeah,” she replies sadly.

“ _Fuck_. That’s fucking awful.” Clint can’t imagine what that would be like. Clint can hardly imagine life without his camera. Losing an arm means more than just the camera though, it means the diving and the climbing and the balance and _eating_ and having to relearn your whole body. _Fuck_.

“Yeah… do you – ? Can I come in?”

“Oh yeah.” Clint snaps back into the here and now to stand aside and let her in. His couch is covered in boxes and clothes and camera equipment though, and he looks at it a little nonplussed before mentally shrugging.

“You can have the other side,” he says, gesturing at the bed. “It’s huge and I sleep like the dead. It’s no worry.”

He’ll just have to spend the night _not_ thinking about the really hot woman on the other side. Funny how a real bed with real sheets suddenly makes sharing a small space with someone seem so much more intimate.

“I wouldn’t want to be a – ”

“No bother,” Clint says, cutting her off. “In fact, you’d be more of a bother if you made me move my shit. I have a _system_.”

Natalia looks at the boxes. “I’m sure you do,” she says sceptically.

He’ll also, he thinks, have to wear a t-shirt tonight. Alas.

Natalia is basically ready for bed, so Clint shuffles around the room, brushing his teeth and getting changed and sorting himself out. She taken the left side, nearest the door, so Clint takes the right, setting an alarm and taking out his hearing aids just before reaching to switch the light off.

“G’night, Natalia,” he says quietly as he plunges the room into darkness.

He can hear her says something, but it’s indistinct. He assumes its goodnight too and as such, jumps when her fingers brush his shoulder. He can’t see her in the dark, and he can hardly hear her but she seems to realise this and raises her voice enough so he can make out her words.

“Natasha,” is what he thinks she says.

“Huh?”

“Natasha. Friends call me Natasha.”

Clint smiles at her in the dark, not that she can see.

“G’night Natasha,” he says quietly.

“Cпокойной ночи, Clint,” he hears, just loud enough for him to make out. He figures that’s goodnight too.

 

As far as Clint knows, he didn’t octopus all over Natali– _Natasha_ in the night. But he can’t be sure because she’s gone when he wakes up and must have been for a while, judging by the cold sheets on her half of the bed.

He finds her down in the hotel dining area on her laptop, and she jumps slightly as he dumps a huge continental breakfast down on the table.

“Sorry,” he says, and she shrugs.

“S’fine,” she says, fiddling some more before closing the laptop. “What’s the plan?”

Clint has to swallow around a mouthful of eggs and bacon before replying. “Helicopter tomorrow and Wednesday – optional for you I guess. I dunno what you want to do with that, if anything.”

“Nah, I’ll stay down here.”

“OK, then,” Clint takes a gulp of coffee before continuing.

“So, today I’m going to talk to some more of the guys from the university and the park and get some good climbing places. If you don’t mind tagging along for that, that would be great. I’m not sure I’d be able to translate what I’m wanting all that easily. Then it’ll just be finding base camps and doing one and two day hikes to find good spots. I want a couple of weeks to film eagles, and a couple for night shoots. The rest can be made up as we go along. Sound good?”

Natasha shrugs. “Yeah, sounds fine. I’m going up to get ready. Leave by half nine?”

Clint nods.

“And thanks, by the way.”

Clint raises an eyebrow at her.

“For… you know, letting me stay the night. It was… I slept much better.”

Clint doesn’t say anything for a moment, the vague memory of waking in the middle of the night to find Natasha much closer than he expected suddenly surfacing. It’s unfair that the hottest woman he’s ever shared a bed with he hasn’t actually slept with. Such is life.

“Any time,” he says, before pulling a ‘why the fuck did you say that?’ face. “I mean… um, well you know.” He gestures vaguely behind him. “I’ll just… go.”

Natasha smiles at him, amused and slightly mocking. “Not too far.”

“Huh?”

“Half nine, remember?”

“Um, yeah,” Clint says, retreating before he can say anything else dumb. He’s managed coming up to four months with Natasha, so of course now is the time his brain decides to remind him that she’s ridiculously attractive. Clint supposes it’s partially to do with her being cold and uncommunicative before; he can be shallow, but he’s not that bad. So of course it turns out that she’s nice as well. Nice, completely out of his league, and probably dating James Barnes because who wouldn’t? Hell, Clint would date James Barnes, as Kate frequently points out to him. What can he say? Talent is sexy and Clint is easy.

 

Two days later while flying over the mountains of Guilin, Clint comes to the realisation that he actually enjoys working with Natasha. He’s always loved flying, and that hasn’t changed, but underneath the joy of open skies there’s the lingering wish to be able to turn around to Natasha to enthuse about the sheer rock faces, dramatic drops and patchwork patterns of the rice paddies far below. Shang is wonderful, but Clint can’t talk to him – in English, Mandarin _or_ ASL – so it’s not the same. Plus, Shang is gripping the armrests tight enough to hurt, so Clint would feel mean trying to get him to understand right now. Maybe Clint will get Natasha to _subtly_ suggest it’s OK if he wants to stay behind next time.

He gets the same after working jobs with Kate; sometimes turning around to tell her something before realising she’s working a job in Laos or Vanuatu or somewhere equally far away from him. But that’s a camaraderie thing. This is… well, something else.

He’s never wanted to kiss Kate.

How did this happen again? Clint’s inclined to blame May.

 

They’ve been filming on the rocks for almost two and a half months now. Clint spent the first three weeks filming a nest of eagles, sitting up in his hide for hours on end while Natasha hiked around with Shang and visited a _school_ _in a giant cave_. (Clint would be jealous but Shang and Natasha are taking him there just before they leave, and Clint can’t wait. Clint loves kids, and it’s a _school in a giant cave_ , which is about the coolest thing ever. Who wouldn’t want to go to school in a giant cave?) Then came a delightful month of scrambling around on rocks and filming mountain goats, though the best thing about it wasn’t the goats, or even the rocks, but the fact that Natasha would let him check her harness straps before going up each time and then _smirk_ at him as he did.

She’s distracting; a terrible, distracting woman. Clint might be a little in love.

Then there were some more weeks of proper climbing, in which Clint was happy to see Natasha get more comfortable, both on the ropes and with him as her partner. She’s deceptively strong, and Clint was slightly in awe of the ease with which she hauled huge bags of camera equipment up and down the pulley systems he’d rigged.

Thankfully, there had been no accidents to rival the caving.

So now, three weeks from the end of their time in Guilin, Clint had come to the night shoot portion of his trip. He and Natasha set up hides for the filming of bats, owls, and other night-time critters a couple of nights ago, and most of them were normal: low hides at cave entrances, tents covered in fake leaves at pools in streams, the usual. But Clint had also wanted something special – or more accurately, he wanted to sleep out on the cliff face and needed a convenient excuse.

Trad can be difficult to get permits for; officials of national parks tend not to be huge into you hammering pegs into their cliffs. Which is fine, completely understandable, but sometimes you can’t rig pulleys from natural anchor points; you have to provide your own. Clint had known he’d wanted to do this since before he even left for Guilin, so he’d ensured that Shang had browbeaten the relevant government officials into giving him permission to place a number of pegs into the best east-facing cliff face available in order to spend one night out on the cliff face and catch the sunrise. Of course, the weather could fuck up his plans spectacularly, but the past couple of days have been glorious, so Clint is pretty confident that it’ll all work out fine.

Clint had asked Shang if he’d like to come with them – he’d assumed Natasha was a given without asking her, which was a little presumptuous he knew, but turned out to be entirely correct anyway so he felt vindicated – and he didn’t even need Natasha there to translate when Shang’s look of horror said it all for him. Clint remembered the helicopter ride and figures he should have guessed, really.

So now Clint is sitting tucked into a sleeping bag on a platform five hundred feet above the ground with his camera trained on the horizon and Natasha sat next to him, leaning back against the cliff wall and looking utterly relaxed. It’s just past five in the morning and sometimes Natasha’s teeth glint in the ambient light as she smiles, and he thinks he could be in love.

Or maybe he just is missing his coffee. That’s probably it. Hopefully.

Natasha shifts over to peer over the edge of their platform.

“Bats coming in to roost,” she says into the twilight and Clint peers over the edge to see where she’s pointing.

“Do bats roost?” he muses, watching them whirl below.

Natasha laughs. “Yeah, fly boy, bats roost.”

Clint raises an eyebrow at her. “Fly boy?”

She shrugs elegantly. “You’re a bird lover. Obsessed with eagles and hawks and falcons. Fly boy fits.”

Clint makes a mental note never to tell her he was born in Iowa. He doesn’t need another person calling him Hawkeye. Kate and May are enough, even if Kate genuinely thinks it’s cool.

“What does that make you? Eel girl? Blind barbell girl?” Clint perks up rather dramatically. “Batgirl!”

“Ice queen, mostly,” Natasha says.

Her voice is light, but there’s a set to her shoulders that says that the name is used, and it bothers her.

“Really? People call you that?”

She shrugs. “Apparently I’m cold and unapproachable.”

It’s getting lighter. Sunrise can’t be more than half an hour off. In the gathering light, Clint looks at the set of her jaw and the practiced casualness Natasha is trying to use to cover up her discomfort.

“Nah,” Clint says eventually. “You’re more like one of those cats that look at you like you’ve offended their existence by sitting on their chair but can be bought by tuna and belly rubs and eventually sit on your lap and scratch the hell out of anyone who tries to move them.”

Natasha looks at him like he’s mad. OK, so that was a tad… obvious. She doesn’t need to know Clint probably wants to pet her and have her sit in his lap.

“Or… you know, something.” Coffee, he needs coffee. “I’ll shut up now.”

Natasha opens her mouth to say something but clicks it closed a moment later when she clearly can’t think of anything.

They sit in silence then, watching the sky getting lighter and lighter. Natasha shifts around, getting her camera ready, testing filters and angles and lenses, and somehow she ends up sitting a little closer when she’s done than she was when she started. Clint glances at her out of the corner of her eye, but she’s settled back against the cliff now, well out of any shots Clint decides to make.

“I’d rather be a cat than an ice queen,” Natasha says eventually.

Clint stares straight ahead for a moment wondering when this started to be so weird. He eventually turns to look at her and when he sees her, she’s smiling at him; a small, genuine thing that looks completely at home on her face. The light is greying out now, the first hints of blue streaking across the sky, making Natasha looks ghostly and slightly ethereal, even in her fleece and sleeping bag.

Clint nods at her, at a loss to do anything else, and Natasha nods back, before silently gesturing that the lightshow is about to begin. Clint turns back to the camera, making sure that all the filters are correct and that it hasn’t shifted position since he last checked, because he’s not sure he can look at her anymore.

Sunrise over Guilin isn’t the _best_ thing Clint has ever seen, but it is spectacular. The world bursts into light and colour and Clint can watch the shadow’s creep down the sides of the mountains. If he looks behind him, he can see it happening on the cliff face they’re hanging from, painting the rock a vibrant orange that fades into daylight almost immediately.

A moment ago, Clint could hear Natasha’s camera shutter click click click, but it’s gone silent now, and Clint drags his eyes from the sky to look at her where she sits against the rock face, hand up and covering her eyes in anticipation of the light about to reach them. Clint checks his camera once more and turns back to Natasha just as the first rays of sun turn her hair into a fiery halo.

Clint can feel the heat of the sun moving down his face, but he doesn’t turn. Instead he lifts his trusty Nikon and, as the slanting light seems to cut Natasha’s body in half, clicks the shutter closed just once.

The noise makes her turn, her eyes locking on his for a moment, before she smiles and embarrassment forces Clint back to his camera.

They sit up there for three hours, not speaking. Clint films the sunrise, the eagles catching the thermals as they start to rise, the goats he can see on the hillside opposite, the flock of starlings that race past and the falcon that plummets, suddenly and unexpectedly, on some poor little mammal hundreds of feet below.

And all the while Natasha just sits behind him and breathes.

 

Clint gets back to New York after being thirty hours in transit to find a horrendous magnet of a grinning leprechaun stuck to the inside of his post-box. His back hurts from lugging his camera equipment on the subway, and all he wants to do is sleep for a week. But it’s just gone nine in the morning and if he does that his sleeping pattern will be out of whack for a week, so instead he calls May, complaining about his layover in Beijing, then his layover in Paris and then the godawful leprechaun magnet and “what the fuck were you doing in Ireland? You don’t have Irish relatives too do you?”

“No, Barton,” May says in the long suffering tone Clint swears she reserves for him and him alone. “I went back to London to talk to James Barnes about representation. He lost an arm in a rockfall in France, and his old agent dropped him because his old agent was an ableist moron.”

“Huh?” Clint says, completely unable to wrap his head around the idea that May now represents James Barnes.

“James Barnes, Barton. Keep up. You’ve only had a hard-on for him since forever.”

Clint still doesn’t say anything of value, so May sighs and continues.

“I’ll make sure you meet in the next couple of weeks. He’s flying to Washington to talk to NatGeo and to see a friend and then I’m getting him here to introduce him to some people. You can be one of those people. But please, be professional and as non-embarrassing as you can.”

Clint makes a weird strangled sound before forcing out, “It’s James Barnes,” like that’s reason enough to be a moron.

May certainly thinks that’s what he means because she just sighs before saying, “At least _try_ , OK?”

Clint nods before remembering she can’t see him and mumbling, “Yeah.”

“And you better have gotten me something tacky and awful Clint. I’m counting on you.”

“The tackiest and most awful,” Clint promises, regaining some of his higher brain functions. “I’ll give it to you on Monday.”

“You better,” May says warningly, before hanging up unceremoniously.

Clint stares at his phone for a moment before shrugging and dropping it on the couch in favour of pulling his laptop towards him to check his emails. Kate’s written him a long rambling message that essentially says ‘no jaguars yet’, and Clint momentarily misses her so much his chest aches. He vows to organise a satellite link-up as soon as possible.

As he’s musing on this another email pops up into his inbox, this time from natalia@nromanovaphoto.com. Clint clicks on it in the manner of someone waiting to see if the thing under the blanket will bite them, because Clint is ridiculous and too tired to pretend otherwise.

> _Hey Barton,_
> 
> _Thanks for the company these past six months. I had a great time and got some fantastic shots._
> 
> _James has apparently signed up with a new agent – Ms Melinda May – and is going to meet her in New York after seeing a friend in Washington. I’m coming out with him because Washington is lovely this time of year and Steve – James’ friend – is a darling. Fancy meeting up in New York? You can show me the sights and I can mock your ‘culture’. How does that sound to you? I’m not sure when we’re getting to New York but we’re landing in Washington on the 26 th. And then I can introduce to you James. Maybe you’ll make a fool of yourself in front of him in much the same way you did with me. And I can laugh at you._
> 
> _Let me know if this works for you,_
> 
> _See you soon, hopefully,_
> 
> _Natasha_
> 
> _P.S. Print it off A4 glossy. It looks amazing, even if I do say so myself._

There’s a photo attached, and Clint clicks on it to find his own face staring back.

He remembers this being taken. It was in the cave system after they’d fallen. He’s leaning over the dark water, the arm holding the torch beneath the surface just out of frame. But the effect is clearly visible nonetheless; the light fracturing in the water makes it look as though the lake is glowing. The light catches his face as he looks straight into the camera and it must be one of the first she took because he looks alert as opposed to confused. The wet tips of his hair glisten and every crease on his face stands out in sharp detail.

It doesn’t look like him. It looks more like some fantasy shoot: the glowing water, his face, prop hand and shoulders picked out in wavering light and the black stretching out behind him.

As a picture of him, he’s not sure he likes it.

As a piece of photographic art, he thinks he wants to marry it.

And suddenly he’s scrambling, turning over his bags until he digs out his Nikon. He drags out the SD card and scrolls through the last few thousand photos he didn’t transfer to one of his hard drives for safekeeping until he finds the photo he wants. He only took one, and he’s praying to whatever deity is listening that this photo is good because if it’s not he’s probably going to cry.

It’s fucking perfect.

The rock behind Natasha is glowing orange and the sky to her left is a delicate eggshell morning blue. Her hair is a shocking fiery red and the shadow of the sunrise slices across her shoulders. Her hand is trying to shade her eyes, but she still wants to see and the angle’s wrong, so her eyes glitter where her hands fail to shade them properly. Her skin is washed perfectly with the early morning light and she has the tiniest, most perfect tilt to her mouth.

Clint stares at it a moment then links up the printer to his laptop, printing first his photo then Natasha’s onto glossy A4 paper. There’s so much black in the photo of him that he’ll probably need to buy more ink but it’s totally worth it.

He looks at them a little longer before pulling his laptop towards him again and hitting ‘reply’.

> _Hey Nat,_
> 
> _Melinda May is my agent too – didn’t I say? – so I think I’d be meeting James anyway, but it would be awesome to see the two of you in New York. Just let me know when you’re free and I’ll be there._
> 
> _See you soon,_
> 
> _Clint_
> 
> _P.S. Print it A4 glossy. It’s fucking perfect. And yours is phenomenal._
> 
> _P.P.S. I refuse to believe that James Barnes is as hot as you._

He attaches his photo, hitting ‘send’ before he can talk himself out of it and then gets up to tack the two photos on his fridge using May’s godawful magnets. They sit pride of place next to his favourite photo of Kate and him from the Himalayas, bundled up in thick coats and pulling faces at the camera with Mt Everest behind them.

He then grabs a pen and circles the 26th on the dog calendar Kate buys him every year, his stomach flipping.

**Author's Note:**

> Summary quote is a "popular Chinese saying" according to Wikipedia. But Wikipedia can lie, so maybe take that with a pinch of salt. I've never been to Guilin though I have been to China and I'm a PADI certified diver, but nothing close to this level. Sorry for inaccuracies there or anywhere else.
> 
> Now with a little sequel: [First Wild Promise](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7089352).


End file.
